


Anchor

by cywlwhip



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:08:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1049669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cywlwhip/pseuds/cywlwhip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth knew Paul didn't love her, but she couldn't figure out why he stayed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anchor

Beth had never been in love before. Sure, she'd been in relationships, but they'd always felt like placeholders to her, someone to keep her company while she waited for the real thing. They were certainly fun placeholders, but being they had felt so light and airy that it was ultimately meaningless, and within a few months she found herself floating away. Her friends had called her a maneater and she’d just smiled tightly and waited for the right person to find their way into her life.

Paul felt like an anchor from the first moment she'd met him. Their eyes had met, in that perfect romcom way, across a crowded bar and Beth knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that they were meant to find each other. That they were meant to be. Paul was her rock, from that very first moment. He was stoic and while others would accuse him of being emotionless and cold, to Beth he was exactly what she needed, a constant steady presence to balance out her swirling mind. On the outside she'd tried to keep a stoic presence too, and her family made fun of them for it, calling them the robots in love, but Beth didn't care. She's found her person, someone who understood, and she'd clung to him as tight as she could. And where other men would have fled, would have freaked out at how much she needed him, Paul stuck around, stoic and fierce and strong and there, and Beth loved him for that. Before Paul she'd wondered if there was anyone on the planet who could deal with her bullshit, and like magic he'd appeared.

She sometimes wondered what he saw in her, why he put up with her multi-day crying jags and bouts of insecurity, but she chalked those thoughts up to low self esteem. If he was there, if he stuck around, then maybe there was something worthwhile in Elizabeth Childs, and she was going to do her damnedest to live up to that. 

But even as she tried, as she woke up every morning and faced the mirror, trying to find the person worth loving Paul saw her her, the question lingered. What did he see in her? Why would he stick around?

Did he even love her at all?

She started running mini-experiments, testing the waters. "If he picks up before the third ring, he loves me." "If he stays home when I call in sick, he cares." "We're meant to be if he curls up in bed with me when I haven't left it all day and just screamed at him for everything that's going wrong in my life."

He picked up on the fourth ring, begged off to work and started staying at Cody's when things got rough. Still, he always came home and he always picked up, eventually, and Beth decided she'd just have to work harder, be better, and eventually he'd love her too. 

But instead of getting better, she'd gotten worse, spiraling out of control, the prescriptions piling up as she tried to keep it all together. She started screaming at him more, throwing out as much abuse as she could in the hopes that one morning he wouldn't come back but he always did, with his suitcase and overcoat and a stoic look on his face. The horrifying realization dawned on Beth that it wasn't a front, a calm exterior for her benefit but rather how he truly felt about her, blank and uninterested. There was no silver lining, no good in her that kept him around. Paul didn't love her, and he probably never had. She started cutting him out of her life, tried not to need him as much as she truly did, and set about digging in to find out why he’d even stuck with her all all.

Beth's quest to figure out what was keeping Paul in her life actually gave her strength, for a little while. She had a sense of purpose and direction in her life, something proactive she could do. Unlike her mental illness, this was a problem she could actually solve, with the skill sets and abilities she already possessed. She was a cop, after all. Looking for clues, finding answers, reading between the lines; that was something she understood, the steps laid out clearly in front of her. 

She wasn't prepared for what she found out, though. Clones and experiments and sick Germans and mysterious assassins. It was all too big, too much, and rather than calming the swirling in her head it only added to the storm, bringing her to the breaking point again and again. But she had to be strong, the cop, the tough one who kept them all together and searching for answers, because that's what she was good at, that's what she could do. It was pretty much her fault that they'd been thrown into this mess, anyway. If she'd just accepted Paul as he was, if she'd just let him stay with her despite how he clearly didn't love her, then none of this would have happened to them. Never mind that it had been Katja that had contacted her. If Beth hadn't been so obsessed with finding a conspiracy to blame Paul's actions on, maybe she wouldn't have actually found one, and dragged Alison and Cosima and god knows who else into it, too. 

She tried to be strong, to do what needed to be done, but the tempest in her mind raged on and the silent body in her bed weighed down her heart and her soul. 

"If he picks up before the third ring, he loves me."

The call clicked through to voicemail, and Beth started taking off her shoes.


End file.
